Archive for the ‘Releases’ Category

As promised, the 0.9.1 release is now out. It is somewhat faster than 0.9, the core is around 30-40% faster, and MMU performance is nearly an order of magnitude better, but rendering performance is still holding things back overall. There’s also (finally) preliminary VMU support for anyone who cares about that – you can attach them in the controller settings panel.

As always, it’s available from the download page, release notes are here. And to make things even easier for Debian users, there’s now an apt repository available – just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

This is the first version where we can say that most software should “just work”, outside of a small number of known issues – so please report any other problems you encounter. Note however that the focus of 0.9 has been on accuracy – performance has not substantially changed from earlier versions. That will be the main aim of the work for 0.9.1 “Speedy”, along with timing precision and a few other things.

As promised, 0.8.4 is now available from the usual place. For the first time, I’ve also put up binaries for Debian(unstable) andÂ OS X (10.4+). Again, this is a minor release with the bulk of the changes under the hood, so don’t expect radical changes to the emulation quality or compatibility.

Last 0.8 point release, I swear. Just for a change, this one actually has some new features too. Specifically, it now runs linux (now some may argue that that’s not actually a _useful_ feature, but it’s a nice milestone)

With that out of the way, I think it’s finally time to rip the renderer apart and fix it all up, don’t you? ^_^

Change of plans – because svn looks likely to become unstable for a little bit with recent work (mmu changes are fairly invasive, and there’s quite a performance penalty that I haven’t optimized away yet), I’m releasing 0.8.2 as it is now (without TLB) for the benefit of those who need the fixes since 0.8.1.
Note: There are no significant changes to the emulation (ie no change to compatibility) – If 0.8.1 runs properly for you, you don’t need 0.8.2

Changes from 0.8.1

x86-64 architecture support

Preliminary Mac OS X support

Pbuffer support (to support OpenGL drivers without EXT_framebuffer_object)

I wasn’t originally planning to do a point release, but it’s probably worth fixing a few issues that were reported on the forums (mostly configure / portability related). Plus you get full-screen and GDI image support thrown in for free too!

I’d be interested to know how this fares on x86-based *BSD systems if anyone wants to test it out – hopefully it should be possible to at least build it now.

Changes

Fix configure script to abort if it doesn’t find a required library (eg, libGL.so or libz.so)

Add checks to the configure script for linux/cdrom.h, and avoid building the CD-Rom driver if it’s not found.

With the work done in the last month both for performance and usability, it seems worthwhile to release a new version. And since this version is actually (hopefully) useable by people who aren’t me, lxdream now has a real version number rather than a milestone. W00t!
Download it and enjoy. And of course, let me know how it goes.

Note: Please do not report rendering problems at this stage – there are many known bugs and unimplemented features, and it’s looking like the whole rendering stage may need to be rewritten for the next version.

M3 is now out as promised. Essentially the same as M2 but with better performance courtesy of the translator. I’d appreciate feedback from anyone who’d like to try it out and let me know how it runs.M4 work plan (Dec 07):

Well what are you waiting for? Download it already ^_^. The major work this week was in the video output rewrite (bug #27) – I was originally going to delay this until after the release, but it just made it in in the end. It both cleans up that part of the code a _lot_, as well as fixes a few bugs related to multiple buffers. It also makes render-to-texture much easier to implement now.

The next release (Milestone 3) is intended to be 2-3 months away, with the main priorities being the SH4 recompiler (ie speed), and getting a reasonable end-user UI in place.Changes

It’s been a long, slow process getting to this point, but we’re finally ready to release the first milestone of the dreamcast emulator now known as lxdream. Click here to download the source and view the release notes. Don’t expect too much of it at this stage – this is a development preview only. It still has a long way to go before it’s ready for general use.